Every year, major music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music give their listeners the holiday treat of recapping the top songs, albums, and podcasts they enjoyed over the past 12 months. Sometimes it's no big surprise, but all too often, it's worth sitting down in a roundtable discussion and asking ourselves, "Wait, I listened to 693 minutes of what???"
Ethan Kaye: Hey-o everybody! Welcome to the Pop Heist roundtable of our music streaming service recaps, aka "The year Ethan found out via Spotify Wrapped that he was old and listened to no music newer than 1991."
Ansley Pentz: Spotify told me that my January was "Van Life Actor Indie Folk," one of its many word salads of a label, and I am offended. I don't believe in van life! For so many reasons, but on a personal note: I want one consistent place where I can look at all my things without packing them up in tiny, stupid containers. (Some would call this a home.) Who knew that Julia Jacklin signified impermanence?
Meghan Kaye: The labels were something else this year. My August was "Pink Pilates Princess Roller Skating Pop," which is slightly surreal to someone who's one bog away from going full swamp hag.
Brett White: Ah, it's the time of year where I'm reminded that I do not use Spotify. But I did just learn that Apple Music Replay exists, and it desperately wants me to know that I'm yet another basic gay who listened to Carly Rae Jepsen for 589 minutes this year. I'll also point out that I'm a luddite who wishes he still bought CDs, ripped them to his computer, and synced them to his iPod instead of having Tim Cook and his lackeys decide that I can no longer listen to music that I own physically because it is no longer "available in my region." … What were we talking about?
EK: The fact that my most listened-to artist of the year was Artie Shaw, who died in 2004 at the ripe old age of 94?
AP: I will say, my husband's 2024 focus on procuring a record player has skewed my Spotify listening habits this year. I've listened to so much that is creamier and richer than a digital platform can offer, and also importantly, I've listened to things that are not predicated on boundless decision-making. (How does one decide what to experience when everything is on the table?)
EK: I feel you on that last point. 2024 was the year I listened to a ton of jazz (my September Spotify theme was "1920's Harlem Renaissance Jazz") and that all stems from two things: a friend of mine who's a jazz buff and gives me suggestions, and Tumblr, where I find oddball albums that I actually listen to. Buddy Collette was one of those, he was one hell of a sax player.
MK: The only thing I could relate to in that was "Tumblr." My Spotify was critically underused for music this year — case in point, my top track for the year was The Rascals' "A Beautiful Morning," a song that I listened to a couple dozen times because I was using it as part of a new business pitch for my day job. I was mainlining fiction and D&D actual-play podcasts like there was no tomorrow. ("The Silt Verses"! "The Magnus Protocol"! "Malevolent"! Binging Critical Role's "Mighty Nein" campaign!) My Top 5 looked a lot less like what I actually listen to so much as it looked like the songs Spotify's algorithm pushes to the top of my playlists. Admittedly, one of those songs is Handsome Boy Modeling School's "The Truth," which is a certified Grade A bop.
Sebastian Deken: I don't even want to talk about how badly my Apple Music end-of-year dragged me. (Like Brett, a lot of Carly Rae — the fact that he listens to her at all falls squarely on my shoulders.) There were some fun highlights; according to Apple, I was in the top 1,000 listeners of Yelle, one of my all-time favorites. And some really great stuff ended up in my list of top 100 listens — or whatever playlist Apple barfed up at the end of my overview.
But on the highest level, embarrassingly same-same, especially for a musician. A huge chunk of my music from this year was just one album repeating twice as I fell asleep on the subway on the way home from the office.
MK: Yelle!! That brought back some very visceral memories of scream singing Safari Disco Club in dive bars in Caen.
Megan Magray: Is anyone proud of their Wrapped? I feel like that's the thing about it — it's always embarrassing, never curated. I've been using record.club this year, which is a cute way to show off the best of my taste, or at least the music I want to represent me. But my Wrapped was, um, visceral. Very much a portrait of a female dirtbag (Bully, Blondshell, Cibo Matto, Allie X, and Charli XCX, obviously) and also white womanhood (Sleigh Bells, Hinds, Cults). As if I wish I lived in Williamsburg in 2011.
SD: Absolutely will not lie, I was/am obsessed with Sleigh Bells — absolutely still blast Treats in the car now and then on road trips with Brett. But then, I was living in New York in the actual year of our lord 2011 and attempting coolness in my own sad way. All the cool music from 2008-2014 is kind of mashed up in a ball in my brain.
MM: For some reason, music from that era was heavy in my rotation this year. I think because I started 2024 with a prediction that indie sleaze would make a comeback — yes, I have the receipts — and it did: We got The Dare, a banner year for Charli XCX, and the kids are buying up our digital point-and-shoots from "the 2010s." You know, we entered the year with the kids having completed an aesthetic speedrun of every decade between 1960 and 2010, so a 2010s resurgence was next in line. Also, culturally, we seemed overdue for a wave of Obama-era optimism and its accompanying twee fashions: patterned tights, side bangs …
EK: Anyone want to talk about Art Tatum? The year was 1949…
MM: Okay, sure, but really fast, on the humiliation ritual of Spotify Wrapped. If I were presenting my curated hits of the year, I'd be pointing out that I was hyperfixated on like, '70s Nigerian funk, this one live recording of Jimmy Campbell's "Half Baked" (1977), and a couple of country blues songs from 1911 I heard on the radio upstate. So I feel like it's impressive that your Wrapped actually reflects something more niche. Your true self is avant-garde, Ethan! ... Now, do you want to tell us about Art Tatum?
EK: Well, always, but I think the context of my Wrapped explains a lot more. I have a playlist of like 400 of my favorite songs, so if I'm driving, I'm usually listening to that and rarely hit the same songs multiple times in a year. That's all rock and fun stuff. But for my downtime, like reading or puttering around in my office, I tend to listen to jazz where I can just use it to relax. I go back to the same artists, that's why Artie Shaw was No. 1 on my list. I spent many evenings putting old anime magazines in plastic bags and listening to tons of Artie Shaw clarinet jazz because it wasn't intruding on my enjoyment of reading those magazines.
AP: Megan, I, too, feel like Spotify ridiculed me — e.g., how was Taylor Swift a top artist of mine when I really did not like her last album and largely stopped listening to her because of it? (Ethan, you are breaking the system by creating your own playlist, breaking away from the algorithm! And listening to music that can't be mocked!) The point of Wrapped feels like it's to drag us a bit, and though it seems like a fun idea, it always just leaves us feeling bad, doesn't it?
In all of this, I've been thinking about two things: First, a meme my friend Ryan shared, which I genuinely find funny and also am like I'm never sharing my true self again, you bitches!!!!
And second, this site that I remember circulating around in 2020. Google didn't yield any helpful results for "What was that website that dragged your Spotify Wrapped?" and so it wasn't until I searched my texts that I could find pudding.cool and realize it was dragging us through the use of AI. I've really prided myself on having never used AI — for the environmental and creative impacts, among other reasons — and today, I learned that it's not true. That was a real bummer.
Because of all of the ways Spotify's tech has evolved, I've listened to less music, and less new music, on the platform this year than in the past. The algorithm is constantly feeding me so much Phoebe Bridgers whispercore that I want to jump off a bridge. (I tried to think of some less violent-toward-self way to say this, but. This is not the space for judgment.)
BW: I don't like Apple Replay thinking one of my top genres is "adult alternative." It sounds like it's 1996 and I'm working in a used CD store that sells incense and Beck bumper stickers. My Replay did not come close to capturing what I'm proud of in 2024, as a listener of music: my curated, thematic playlists. All of them with a one-word title, all caps, accompanied by a tight headshot of the person who best sums up the mood.
RESILIENT (Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock with a bloody nose). MASCULINITY (Bob Newhart blowing a huge bubble). HOMOSEXUALITY (Charles Nelson Reilly in straight man drag). OASIS. JANET (Jackson). DAD. DIVAS (Eva Gabor). I'm particularly proud of MASCULINITY, which are all the songs that make me, a gay man who does drag, feel proud to be a man — so, Roxy Music, Spoon, Electric Light Orchestra, Squeeze, Traveling Wilburys, Phil Collins, etc.
SD: I make one playlist and then add to it for years until it becomes unmanageable — continued in 2024 to add to my synth pop playlist from 2018 (which has long since strayed from actual synth pop). But I had no new playlists this year to speak of, and most of the "new" albums I listened to were actually old — some a few years and some several decades. For instance, I discovered John Farnham's Whispering Jack (1986), and listened to it a lot; I springboarded onto that from the soundtrack from Rad (also 1986). Not usually a movie-soundtrack guy but this one is killer.
BW: Speaking of, I loved X-Men '97 deeply, but I have no idea how the soundtrack is my top album of the year. I could've sworn I listened to The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess or Radical Optimism way more. Chappell and Dua, no match for Rogue and Storm.
MK: Why must we pit women against each other?? JK JK — I'm just angling for a Rogue/Storm/Chappell/Dua mashup. But I feel that confusion on how your top album happened. My top artist this year was Wir sind Helden, a German pop rock band whose album Von hier an blind was the soundtrack to my 2005. According to Spotify, I listened to it for approximately 129 minutes. For someone who hyperfixated their way to San Francisco playing "Toss a Coin To Your Witcher" on repeat for six hours, listening to one album two and a half times in a day is fuckin' chump change. How it outpaced the few times I ripped through the Hazbin Hotel soundtrack (I know, I know) is beyond me, but I suppose I should be grateful for that. Granted, that didn't stop Jeremy Jordan from being on my Top 5. Bless.
I think more than anything this year, I felt Spotify's use of AI, from the brilliantly put "word salad labels" to the godawful NotebookLM Wrapped podcast. Spotify has been quiet about how they've implemented AI into the Wrapped output, but it's so inherently there. The final output itself feels like a fairly cheap regurgitation of the three songs its own algorithm has fed me, none of which accurately reflect how much I got down to the songs I actually love. Megan Thee Stallion's "Otaku Hot Girl" is nowhere to be found! That feels criminal to me.
SD: I swear I have more music things to say, but this talk of AI artificially weighting some music in these year-end reports has me thinking of the ways the end-of-year stats thing per se disadvantages fantastic music that comes out late in the year. It won't appear on any most-listened count this year and probably won't next year, either, because you listened to it a good amount — but not enough — this year, and you're ready to move on early next year because you've already listened to it plenty of times! This is music-streaming-service gerrymandering.
AP: It is music-streaming gerrymandering!!!!
EK: My second-most-played song I don't recall listening to more than four times ever, and one of those times was because I had to start it over again from the beginning because I got distracted looking through a bookstore and wanted to hear the whole thing. It was the only song on my Wrapped recorded in the last 20 years: T-Pain's 2023 cover of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs," a song originally recorded in 1970. This song is really good, but it has no particular place in my year.
What used to be a fun discussion of what we listened to the most in a year has turned into suspicion!
AP: You know what all of this makes me think of? A discussion I'm seeing on TikTok about anti-intellectualism being rooted in the cheerleading of STEM and the disregard for other important subjects, like language arts, visual arts, history, and the like. We are letting STEM's byproduct, algorithms, control how we feel, how we experience! What a disservice to the full and rich lives we deserve as human beings.
A song I really loved this year — which was my most-listened-to song on Spotify! — was "I Am The River" by Lael Neale. (I saw her live at Mississippi Studios in Portland with a dear friend earlier this year, and it was such a tender experience.)
The lyrics feel very appropriate for this conversation:
I pledge allegiance to tree and meadow
I have no need to conquer or keep them
I'm for the ocean where we will all end
Let us have music while we are moving
I hear the bells of the country churches
I have my sadness and that is sacred
Therе is no feedback, electric static
Let us keep moving, lеt us keep moving
God, I'm so sentimental, it makes me tear up!
BW: Speaking of tears — ! That's why Boston's 1976 self-titled debut album was my No. 5 most-listened-to album of 2024. It was my dad's favorite album, hands-down. I demanded that "Foreplay/Long Time" be played at the end of his funeral service. It absolutely stood apart from the expected gospel music and the [shudder] modern, weepy Christian rock balladry (aka The most manipulative and soulless music on Earth). It was incredibly important to me that his funeral actually showcase who he was, and I know he would've loved it. And of course, I have driven around, listening to that album, and just fucking crying.
… On the other hand, my old UCB comedian pal Phil Augusta Jackson (now a hella successful TV writer!) dropped low-key the banger of the year in "Nothin' Ain't Workin'."
SD: Brett's parents' affinity for prog rock (which I would not have expected) reminds me that one album Apple Music highlighted for me was the soundtrack from Final Fantasy VI (which, disclosure, I wrote a book on). A lot of prog rock influences are in there, including some hyperspecific references to Boston, which I never would have caught if it hadn't been for him/them.
Of course I'm the one to bring up video game soundtracks. Of course.
I picked up the soundtrack from Sea of Stars early this year, and some of it ended up in my top 100. Like the game, I found the soundtrack enchanting if a bit rough around the edges — a few tracks are, if you'll forgive me, stellar. I wish they'd have released the soundtrack from The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, because I need, need to listen to that one on repeat; really charming, but also really intelligently put together (wisdom!) and there are a lot of interesting details to unpack.
Also — when Nintendo announced its own music streaming service, I screamed myself hoarse.
BW: This is true, and I can prove it because I took a screengrab.
Husbands — they're sneaky!
SD: You'll pay for that later. Anyway, can't wait for my 2025 end-of-year report from Nintendo Music showing that I listened to the theme from Metroid 100 times, five songs from the Splatoon series on repeat, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons on one otherwise continuous 365-day loop. And yesterday they added the soundtrack from Wave Race 64, so It's over for you hoes.
AP: I'm going to advocate that we share a few of our top 100 songs of the year with readers, the songs we really do love, embarrassing or not.
EK: As I look through my Wrapped one more time, it seems that so most of the top 100 songs were driven by things that I wanted to play bass to. Just play them through a little bluetooth speaker, crank it up, plug in my 1969 Japanese knock-off Gibson EB bass, and play along (most likely made up my own basslines). So if anything, the songs I am adding to the playlist are both great to listen to but also fun to play.
Alas, I am not available to join your band, dear readers, as I don't have the time to travel to you. Love you anyway! (Mwah!)
MM: Yeah, I don't play any instruments, so my inclusions on this list are the flip side of that coin. They are for putting on repeat, maybe locking in to do some work, taking a dance break here and there. I love constant sound and my listening habits are unchill. My advice for readers: Never forget you can be a 365 party girl in your own living room.
Listen to some of our favorite songs of the year — from the crew's Top 100 lists — on Spotify and Apple Music. Note that there is one discrepancy between the two lists: Ansley listened to Maggie Rogers' "Tim McGraw" cover (yes, Taylor Swift's song from her self-titled album) many times and loves it. It is unfortunately only available on Spotify
